LOCKDOWN HIGH

Are Zero-Tolerance Policies Turning Schools into Authoritarian
Fiefdoms? A Case Today Before the Supreme Court Challenges How Far
Schools Can Go.

In Manassas, Va., a 9-year-old student was suspended for giving a
friend a Certs breath mint under a policy that not only bans any
drugs but also anything that looks like a drug. A girl in Oklahoma
was suspended for bringing a prescription hormone tablet to school to
deal with her ovarian disease. At least 20 students in four states
have been suspended for bringing Alka-Seltzer to their schools. Under
zero-tolerance policies, officials across the country have been
suspending kids for possession of aspirin, cough medicine and even
sunscreen. The question is what lessons are being taught to our
children about basic rights of speech, privacy and due process. Even
more troubling, what type of citizens are we shaping in this
increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian atmosphere?

This controversy will be before the U.S. Supreme Court today in the
case of Savana Redding. Six years ago, Savana was a 13-year-old
eighth-grader when her friend was found with prescription ibuprofen
pills. When the friend was searched, teachers at her Arizona school
also found a day-planner that Redding had loaned her. The friend
implicated Redding as the source of the ibuprofen. A good student
without disciplinary problems, Redding was confronted by assistant
principal Kerry Wilson. She denied any knowledge of the pills but
agreed to let Wilson search her bag. When no ibuprofen was found,
Redding was taken to the nurse's office and told to strip down to her
underwear in front of the school nurse and an administrative
assistant, both women. She stood in her underwear and bra as the two
went through her clothes. Finding nothing, they then made the teen
move her bra and panties, exposing her breasts and pelvic area.

Redding sued. After a lower court found the search to be
unreasonable, the Supreme Court took up the issue -- the latest in a
long line of cases that have treated students as little more than
legal nonentities.

This is a far cry from 1969, when the Supreme Court insisted that
students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of
speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Over the next few
decades, however, a new and more conservative majority chipped away
at these rights to the point that most are now lost long before
students even approach the schoolhouse gate. Indeed, the courts have
allowed students to be punished for speech occurring outside of
school, including on social networking sites.

The Supreme Court has given shifting and conflicting rationales to
justify school searches. In 1985, it ruled that students have little
expectation of privacy in schools -- a self-fulfilling prophecy given
its failure to protect their rights. Ten years later, in Vernonia
School District v. Acton, the court allowed random suspicionless drug
testing of student athletes. But the justices based their decision on
the school's history of drug problems and the fact that athletes were
susceptible to a particular danger of injury if using drugs. The
court insisted that athletes have less expectation of privacy because
they have to undress in open locker rooms and that forcing teenagers
to urinate in cups under the supervision of teachers was a
"negligible" intrusion.

Then, in 2002, the court all but abandoned its earlier logic. Justice
Clarence Thomas wrote that it did not matter if there was no history
of drug problems in Tecumseh, Okla., and dismissed the notion that
athletes warranted different treatment. The court allowed random and
suspicionless testing of any students in extracurricular activities
from 4-H to chess club. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented,
mocking the "nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock
run amok, and colliding tubas disturbing the peace and quiet of Tecumseh."

In the current case, few people would disagree that the search of
Redding's backpack was justified. After all, there had been a couple
of prior incidents involving drugs at the school, and the teachers
heard that students were planning to take the ibuprofen at lunch as a
dare. Yet, the quantum leap from a bag search to a strip search shows
how the court has created virtual feudal estates where students are
treated as scholastic serfs.

The impact of such a search on a 13-year-old girl being stripped in
front of teachers is obvious and severe. Ironically, nurses at most
public schools cannot give a student an aspirin without notifying and
getting the consent of the parents. Yet, rather than simply hold the
student for parents or police, the school can force the child to
strip and expose herself without even notice to the parents.

We need to think seriously about the type of citizens being shaped in
these authoritarian environments. These kids are learning that they
must accept arbitrary and often illogical actions by public figures.
This month in Virginia, an honors high school student was suspended
and faces expulsion for taking her prescribed birth control pill in
school. With such cases, the government appears to be training a
generation of passive citizens ideal for subjugation and control.

In the name of maintaining safe schools, we have created rights-free
zones that treat free speech and privacy as virtual threats to
education. When citizens learn rights as mere abstractions, we should
not be surprised when they treat their obligations as citizens with
the same disregard. Until rights join writing and arithmetic as
required components of public education, our schools will remain
laboratories of authoritarian living.